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There is heroism in trusting yourself to events. That sagacity of which greatness is born puts its prowess to the test of experiment. In this lies the secret of the hero and the scholar; they do not guess their abilities, but determine them by enterprise and achievement. They try. My friend Mr. Storer, who was the wag of the Rhetoric class of which we were members when students, communicated to me the subjoined parody. As the soliloquy of a novice, it expresses with felicity the young speaker's doubts and fears:

To spout, or not to spout, that is the question:
Whether 'tis better for a shamefaced fellow,
(With voice unmusical and gesture awkward,)
To stand a mere spectator in this business,
Or have a touch at Rhetoric! To speak, to spout
No more; and by this effort, to say we end
That bashfulness, that nervous trepidation

Displayed in maiden speeches; 'twere a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To read, to speechify
Before folks, perhaps to fail; ay, there's the rub;
For from that ill success what sneers may rise,
Ere we have scrambled through the sad oration,
Must give us pause: 'tis this same reason
That makes a novice stand in hesitation,
And gladly hide his own diminished head
Beneath some half-fledged orator's importance,
When he himself might his quietus make
By a mere recitation. Who could speeches hear,
Responded to with hearty acclamation,
And yet restrain himself from holding forth-
But for the dread of some unlucky failure-
Some unforeseen mistake, some frightful blunder,

Some vile pronunciation, or inflection,

Improper emphasis, or wry-necked period,

Which carping critics note, and raise the laugh,
Not to our credit, nor so soon forgot?

We muse on this! Then starts the pithy question:
Had we not best be mute and hide our faults,
Than spout to publish them?

Spout and publish them without hesitation. Had Raphael feared to daub, he had never been Raphael. Had Canova feared to torture marble, he had never been a sculptor. Had Macready feared to spout, he had never been an actor. If you stammer like Demosthenes, or stutter like Curran, speak on. He who hesitates to hesitate, will always hesitate.

CHAPTER IX.

PROPORTION.

BOMBAST is inflation; is turgid, dropsical language, great in parade, little in purport. It has its source in exaggeration, in want of proportion. A child catches at its coral and at the moon with the same expectation of clutching it. He has no idea of distance. The boy cuts a stick or trundles his hoop with as much exultation as the man defeats an enemy or wins his wife. The boy has no notion of relative value. As everything seems equally new, so everything seems equally important to him. This want of measure, innocent and healthy in youth, is the source of bombast in men.

"Man is a strange animal, but that complex animal, à public meeting, is stranger. Its vagaries are surprising, and baffle analysis. It always seems to have more force than sense. Two heads are better than one, but some hundreds of heads appear to be worse than none. Take any number of men, each of whom would listen to reason, be open to conviction, and resolute to see fair play all round; compound

the honest men of sense in a public meeting, and the aggregate is headstrong, headlong, rash, unfair, and foolish. Tell any single man, totidem verbis, that there is nobody in the world like him, nobody so lovely and virtuous as his wife and daughters, and he will laugh in your face or kick you out of doors; but tell the aggregate man the same of his multitudinous self and family, he will vent an ecstasy of delight in loud cheers.'"* But only the uneducated imitate. this delusion. The time will come when meetings more than men will tolerate the collective

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nonsense.

The notorious defense of Thurtell some years since, which was so applauded for effectiveness by a portion of the press, is one of the most offensive exhibitions of vanity and wind-bag eloquence extant. Bombast is the language of vulgarity and villainy. Thurtell ought to have been condemned for his defense had he escaped from the penalty of his crime. Carelessness of assertion and wildness of accusation are to the English people extremely distasteful, as marking either a deficiency of intellect or a want of the love. of truth.

Royalty has always been a patient and often a greedy recipient of egregious adulation. The oratory addressed to James I. on his progress through Scotland was of no common cast. Officials who addressed him at the various towns at which he arrived, "put together Augustus, Alexander, Trajan, and Constantine. It was supposed that even the antipodes heard of his courtesy and liberality; the very hills and groves were said to be refreshed with the dew of his aspect; in his absence the citizens

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were languishing gyrades, in his presence delighted lizards, for he was the sunshine of their beauty. At Glasgow Master Hay, the commissary, when attempting to speak before him, became like one touched with a torpedo or seen of a wolf; and the principal of the university, comparing his majesty with the sun, observed, to that luminary's disadvantage, that King James had been received with incredible joy and applause; whereas a descent of the sun into Glasgow would in all likelihood be extremely ill taken. Hyperbole was not sufficient; the aid of prodigies was called; a boy of nine years old harangued the king in Hebrew, and the schoolmaster of Linlithgow spoke verses in the form of a lion."*

The measure of a man's understanding lies in his language. This he inevitably offers to all observers. Besides just taste being outraged by disproportion, he who is guilty of it loses the power of being impressive. We are told of Dante, whose potent use of words has never been surpassed, that great and various as his power of creating pictures in a few lines unquestionably was, he owed that power to the directness, simplicity, and intensity of his language. In him "the invisible becomes visible," as Leigh Hunt says; "darkness becomes palpable, silence describes a character, a word acts as a flash of lightning which displays some gloomy neighborhood where a tower is standing, with dreadful faces at the window."+

"In good prose (says Frederic Schlegel) every word should be underlined;" that is, every word should be the right word, and then no word would

*Progress and Court of King James the First.-"Quarterly Review." "Athenæum," No. 1115.

be righter than another. It comes to the same thing, where all words are italics one may as well use roman. There are no italics in Plato, because there are no unnecessary or unimportant words."*

Declamation, which is assertion without proof, is disproportion in this sense, that it is a dogmatic enunciation, out of proportion with what is known by an auditory who reject the propositions announced. Nearly all Oriental eloquence is declamatory. Perhaps the Orientals are quicker to perceive or less exacting than Europeans, but the want of the reasons was felt among us, and Bishop Hooker supplied them sixteen centuries after.

Precision must be attained at any cost. If we do not master language, says Mr. Thornton, it will master us. An idle word, says the "Daily News," has conquered a host of facts. We must keep watch and ward over words.

CHAPTER X.

STYLE.

ROUSSEAU Sways mankind with that delicious might (the power of words) as Jupiter does with his lightnings. This is John Müller's tribute to the style of Rousseau. It has recently been asserted among us that "style is, and always has been, the most vital element of literary immortalities. More than any other quality, it is peculiar to the writer; and no

*Guesses at Truth.

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